OBSERVING WITH A PURPOSE (Heavily edited from a prior publication in the Astronomical League Reflector)


It could seem that science has been demoting humanity ever since Galileo turned a telescope on the sky.  Prior to that, our ancestors held to the fantasy that Earth, which we presumed to lord over, lay at the center of a perfect, never-changing celestial sphere where the god(s) obsessed over earthly goings on and in more distant times not infrequently dallied with mortal beauties, according to mythologies of the time.



But a few hundred years ago, science and the telescope moved the Earth, and hence us, from the center of it all.  That itself was not too bruising, as the Sun was substituted as center stage.  Orbiting the center vs. being the center, one could say, is the same difference.  But science and the telescope struck again, revealing that our Sun was itself but a star, one among billions strewn around our galaxy, and occupying no particularly conspicuous spot. The humiliation was complete when we learned that our galaxy was not the universe, but just one of countless islands of matter sprinkled here and there in a nearly empty expanse of space beyond comprehension.

The perfect, never-changing celestial sphere was gone.  From lords of it all, the center of the universe, the obsession of the gods, we have descended to top predator on a tiny rock orbiting a common star in an inconspicuous location of an unremarkable galaxy among an uncountable number of galaxies in a vast universe.  Humbling indeed; even lonely!

But I contend that this reality is not humbling at all. The reality of our circumstances only seems to demote us when viewed in the context of our traditional mythologies, created to give us self-importance in our native state of ignorance. In reality, the advent of the scientific method, from which all these revelations have sprung, was a momentous occurrence, not just in terms of human history, but for the universe itself.  The Enlightenment was the realization that the universe ran on fixed laws, laws that the human mind could explore and understand.  As such, it represented the birthing of a willful consciousness for the universe itself - through the human mind.

The gestation period for this consciousness - 13.7 billion years - involved many orders of magnitude more correct rolls of the dice than years for each of the countless steps required for it to fall into place.  First, generations of stars had to be born and die to create the heavy elements that ourselves and our planet are made of.  Then our solar system had to form from these stellar ashes with a star not too big or too small, and with our Earth of the requisite size in orbit at the right distance. Life had to arrive and evolve a mind capable of rational analysis.  From that, an intellect had to emerge capable of grasping the concepts of the Enlightenment that have allowed us to peel back the mysteries of the universe. What a journey!

As a product of the universe, our consciousness may fairly be viewed as the universe's consciousness, our awareness of it, its self-awareness. Our awakening to its reality is for the universe as the emerging self-awareness of a newborn infant exploring its own motions and sensations.  In that sense, the universe acquires a more complete understanding of itself every day through the collective human mind.

What is a universe if no part of it is conscious of its existence, without, in my terms, self-awareness?  With no consciousness to witness its mysteries, beauty, and workings - would its matter matter?  Each of us then, to the extent we choose to witness, observe, experience, or understand the workings of the universe, at any level, is a part of its self-awareness. I think this is intuitively understood, and why people have studied nature all along, why people watch butterflies and birds, catalog plants and insects, study stars and collide atoms. Barring some other consciousness, as yet undiscovered, without humanity the universe would be like a brain-dead body.

So humanity is embarked upon the grandest possible adventure, to explore and know a vast universe, which includes coming to know ourselves - perhaps in the long run the greatest challenge. Our circumstance in reality, whether it proves to be unique or not, does not represent a demotion from that of our ancestors' fantasy; to the contrary, it places us among, if not indeed above, the gods as we once imagined them to be, and in the center of the universe once again.